Nurses were doing things around his body but Sam ignored them. He wished they wouldn’t waste their time. Why did they want to make him keep on living? He was fed up with the constant ‘beep’ of the machinery around him which checked that he was still alive.

Sam had been a doctor, he knew that the nurse’s cheerfulness was false and well practised. They knew he was dying as well as he did. He was 97 after all. Well past his three-score and ten. He wished they’d just let him be. His Esme had passed ten years ago after a stormy marriage, and he had no family to care about. ‘Passed’ is the silly word they use for dead these days, why not used ‘Dead’ he wondered. It is a perfectly good word.

At least the pains in his legs had diminished in the last few days. Sam realised that his legs felt better today too. He still couldn’t move them but they didn’t feel like he had permanently had a knife stuck into them. There was some commotion going on in the ward, but he didn’t open his eyes to check, it seemed like too much trouble. Some poor soul had copped it, no doubt.

The noise stopped with a faint popping noise. Now Sam opened his eyes to see what was happening. Within the light, a long way away stood two silhouetted figures. Sam looked again. The short skirt was looked exactly like his mother had worn in the sixties, and the man with long hair could have been his father at that time. Sam looked down at his own body. The wires had gone, as had the pain. He looked like he had when he was eleven or ten. It was his favourite time in his life, and he noticed that he was wearing the same red tee shirt he had worn for his eleventh birthday.

With that revelation, he knew what was happening to him and rushed towards the light, his parents and happiness.